Transmissible Evidence: Is This the End of Film?

On the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Montréal World Film Festival, Serge Losique, the director of the festival, decided to hold a conference on "new media," with demonstrations of new digital equipment, seminars, and discussions. On Friday, August 31, 2001, one of the sessions had the title "Is This the End of Film?" The fact is, if the companies that manufacture film decide to stop manufacturing and processing film stocks, then film as a medium for the moving picture will definitely end. And the representatives from Kodak were not too sanguine about the prospects for longevity. The end is already at hand for many current moving-picture film types, joining such glorious, no-longer-produced emulsion processes as Technicolor, the last plants for which are in China, but no longer used. (For still photography, the abandonment of Kodachrome 25 and the rumored elimination of a number of slower daylight and tungsten films by both Kodak and Fuji will require a reconsideration of the way certain types of images are made and perceived, both for art and commerce, from National Geographic to Ralph Lauren et al.) The new digital technology is fast becoming the new performative and "documenting" medium.

The rapidity of the acceptance of the digital medium has been daunting. A decade ago, I began to be confused when young "artists" began to talk about their "films," because what I saw was some videotape which they hoped to project on a video projection system. Growing up at a time when film and video, movies and television, celluloid and videotape were mutually exclusive, I couldn't understand why these young people were confusing the terms (not to mention the media). But it was as if these artists had become the lunatic hunters from Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story: if it moves, shoot it, and if you've shot it, you've got a "film." Who cares if film has a grain and video has pixels, if (as Nam June Paik once explained) one medium is essentially chemical and the other essentially electronic? And so many young artists began talking about their dinky videotapes as "films." Some young person would ask, do you want to see my film, and if you answered yes, she or he would whip out a videocassette, and what you'd see wouldn't even be a film-to-tape transfer, but the scuzziest, most pixel-ridden, undefined mess imaginable. Toiling through the field of independent media, you'd run across someone who wanted you to look at their "film," only to be confronted with some awful amateur videotape. Such is the daunting power of art (or nonart), that, damn, if some of those messy videotapes didn't have something. But, by and large, the lack of definition that the cheap video equipment would enforce on the images was only matched by the lack of definition in terms of talent, ideas, and skill.

And now that video (analog or digital) is becoming the medium of the future of the moving image, are there any (immediate) lessons to be learned? For one thing, there is the lesson of cultural standards. During the 1950s, when television technology was in its infancy, the image resolution was impossibly fuzzy, and the problem of reception seemed insurmountable. Video ghosts, vertical rolling, scrambling were part and parcel of television viewing in the 1960s. Pauline Kael, in her 1968 essay "Movies on Television," noted:

Not all old movies look bad now, of course; the good ones are still good—surprisingly good, often, if you consider how much of the detail is lost on television. Not only the size but the shape of the image is changed, and, indeed, almost all the specifically visual elements are so distorted as to be all but completely destroyed. On television, a cattle drive or a cavalry charge or a chase—the climax of so...